Science sometimes contradicts the Gospel

[mfbukowski]

6 hours ago, Teancum said:

More skeptical....   I will work on it.

Here is the link to the pdf 

http://www.peterbyrne.info/documents/sad0711Byrn3p.pdf

And here is some of what it says.

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S tanford university physicist leonard susskind revels in discovering ideas that transform the status quo in physics. Forty years ago he co-founded string theory, which was initially derided but eventually became the leading candidate for a unified theory of nature. For years he disputed Stephen Hawking’s conjecture that black holes do not merely swallow objects but grind them up beyond recovery, in violation of quantum mechanics. Hawking eventually conceded. And he helped to develop the modern conception of parallel universes, based on what he dubbed the “landscape” of string theory. It spoiled physicists’ dream to explain the universe as the unique outcome of basic principles. Physicists seeking to understand the deepest levels of reality now work within a framework largely of Susskind’s making. But a funny thing has happened along the way. Susskind now wonders whether physicists can understand reality

Susskind worries that reality might be beyond our limited capacity to visualize it. He is not the first to express such a concern. In the 1920s and 1930s the founders of quantum mechanics split into realist and antirealist camps. Albert Einstein and other realists held that the whole point of physics is to come up with some mental picture, however imperfect, of what objective reality is. Antirealists such as Niels Bohr said those mental images are fraught with peril; scientists should confine themselves to making and testing empirical predictions. Susskind thinks the contradictions and paradoxes of modern physics vindicate Bohr’s wariness. .....

Did you take any philosophy courses?

Yeah, I did in college. I was quite fascinated by some of the concepts. My interest in it lapsed when I really got hooked by physics.

Are there any philosophers of science whom you like? I’m one of the few physicists I know who likes Thomas Kuhn. He was partly a historian of science, partly a sociologist. He got the basic idea right of what happens when the scientific paradigm shifts. A radical change of perspective suddenly occurs. Wholly new ideas, concepts, abstractions and pictures become relevant. Relativity was a big paradigm shift. Quantum mechanics was a big paradigm shift. So we keep on inventing new realisms. They never completely replace the old ideas, but they do largely replace them with concepts that work better, that describe nature better, that are often very unfamiliar, that make people question what is meant by “reality.” Then the next thing comes along and turns that on its head. And we are always surprised that the old ways of thinking, the wiring that we have or the mathematical wiring that we may have created, simply fail us. In the midst of all this remodeling, is there room for such a thing as an objective reality? Every physicist must have some sense that there are objective things in the world and that it’s our job to go and find out what those objective things are. I don’t think you could do that without having a sense that there is an objective reality. The evidence for objectivity is that experiments are reproducible. If you kick a rock once, you’ll hurt your toe. If you kick a rock twice, you’ll hurt your toe twice. Do the same experiment over and over with a rock, and you’ll reproduce the same effect. That said, physicists almost never talk about reality. The problem is that what people tend to mean by ”reality” has more to do with biology and evolution and with our hardwiring and our neural architecture than it has to do with physics itself. We’re prisoners of our own neural architecture. We can visualize some things. We can’t visualize other things.....

. So I say, let’s get rid of the word “reality.” Let’s have our whole discussion without the word “reality.” It gets in the way. It conjures up things that are rarely helpful. The word “reproducible” is a more useful word than “real.”....

Is it possible to do theoretical physics and not have philosophical thoughts?

Most great physicists have had a fairly strong philosophical side. My friend **** Feynman hated philosophy and hated philosophers, but I knew him well, and there was a deep philosophical side to him. The problems that you choose to think about are conditioned by your philosophical predispositions. But I also have a strong sense that surprises happen and put your philosophical prejudices on their head. People have the idea that there are cut–and-dried rules of science: you do experiments, you get results, you interpret them; in the end, you have something. But the actual process of science is as human and as chaotic and as contentious as anything else.

Which of course perfectly reflects Rorty's view that

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" To say that the world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include human mental states.  To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences, there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations.

     Truth cannot be out there- cannot exist independently of the human mind- because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there.  The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.  Only descriptions of the world can be true or false.  The world on its own- unaided by the describing activities of human beings- cannot."   

 

So yes

If you still believe in objective reality which is not totally contingent upon our perceptions and our brains constructing it as we are able, you are not skeptical enough and need to learn more from both physics and philosophy.

Dude, I don't take out my orange crayon for just anybody... 

 

Edited March 14, 2018 by mfbukowski

[mfbukowski]

So if I say I have a mental state which perceives evidence of God who is anybody to say I do not?? 

You have two famous atheists, a physicist and a philosopher, above shrugging their shoulders about what reality is.

If THEY don't know- who are YOU- or anybody- to tell me otherwise???

 

 

Edited March 14, 2018 by mfbukowski

[RevTestament]

On 3/11/2018 at 2:38 PM, mfbukowski said:

It works both ways and the notion of objectivity is an illusion so it kind of doesn't matter at least to me.  The scriptures were physically written by human hands with a human brain giving the instructions.  So is philosophy.  Philosophy makes no pretense of being "inspired" so it is allegedly etic, and I suppose one could classify scripture as emic. So philosophy mangles scripture and scripture mangles philosophy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emic_and_etic

If you look for example at the history of philosophy the underlying tendency is to be actually dealing with theology.  All the way through the history of philosophy, the existence of God, creating a definition, showing proofs of denials of proofs for God's existence is a main trend through philosophy for the last 2000 years.  You can't separate philosophy from scripture, regardless of tidy slogans like "philosophy mingled with scripture.  Kant vs Hume is about God.   Existentialism is largely about God.   Plato's whole "philosophical" metaphysics was clearly tied to his conception of God as the Form of Good.   The doctrine of the Trinity and the idea of homoousios is straight Plato/Aristotle.  There is evidence that scriptural authors were influenced by gnosticism and even earlier philosophical ideas derived from Euclid and Pythagoras including coded symbology we simply pass over and never think about.   For example what is the significance in the miracle of the fishes of there being exactly 153 fish?  Why 153?  Why did they let down the nets on the "other side" of the boat as a kind of yin and yang symbol of opposition- and does it have a deeper meaning than that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miraculous_catch_of_fish

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesica_piscis

The very symbolism of a circle and a square is related to all this ancient symbology itself, and of its ancient origin in philosophy.

I consider this to be a very good explanation of what you were originally saying. Thank you.

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So where does one start and the other end?  It's all human language and human culture and once you see this it can change your entire perception of these issues 

I reject nor accept any scripture except on the grounds found in Moroni and Alma.  For me accepting spiritual advice from any document is based on....... guess what?  Spiritual confirmation. 

And often that includes what some would classify as "philosophy"

Yes, I think we all tend to interpret scripture through certain color glasses - through ideas of what was originally intended, etc. So I agree without spiritual confirmation of what scriptures mean, we are to a certain extent just "stabbing in the dark." Very well said.

[Teancum]

On 3/13/2018 at 10:18 PM, mfbukowski said:

Here is the link to the pdf 

http://www.peterbyrne.info/documents/sad0711Byrn3p.pdf

And here is some of what it says.

Which of course perfectly reflects Rorty's view that

So yes

If you still believe in objective reality which is not totally contingent upon our perceptions and our brains constructing it as we are able, you are not skeptical enough and need to learn more from both physics and philosophy.

Dude, I don't take out my orange crayon for just anybody... 

 

Good stuff!  Appreciate it!!

[mfbukowski]

4 hours ago, RevTestament said:

I consider this to be a very good explanation of what you were originally saying. Thank you.

Yes, I think we all tend to interpret scripture through certain color glasses - through ideas of what was originally intended, etc. So I agree without spiritual confirmation of what scriptures mean, we are to a certain extent just "stabbing in the dark." Very well said.

thanks for saying so- it helps me figure out what communicates and what does not!

[clarkgoble]

On 3/13/2018 at 8:18 PM, mfbukowski said:

 Truth cannot be out there- cannot exist independently of the human mind- because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there.

Just to be a stinker - that presupposes that truth is essentially tied to sentences. That's not necessarily the case. Peirce thought you could have something like truth and representation without human minds. The abstraction of propositions Peirce called dicisigns. A good book on the subject with examples from molecular biology is Natural Propositions by Frederik Stjernfelt.

Ultimately these questions end up hinging upon whether you think them in terms of generalized signs (semiotics) or merely stay at the sentence level (a small subset of semiotics). 

Edited March 16, 2018 by clarkgoble

[mfbukowski]

2 hours ago, clarkgoble said:

Just to be a stinker - that presupposes that truth is essentially tied to sentences. That's not necessarily the case. Peirce thought you could have something like truth and representation without human minds. The abstraction of propositions Peirce called dicisigns. A good book on the subject with examples from molecular biology is Natural Propositions by Frederik Stjernfelt.

Ultimately these questions end up hinging upon whether you think them in terms of generalized signs (semiotics) or merely stay at the sentence level (a small subset of semiotics). 

OK but as we have discussed before I see Peirce's philosophy as irrelevant to theology whereas Rorty is obviously directly relevant and supportive.

I know you are a Peirce fan but straight up, I don't see any support there for religion of any kind and in fact arguably his attempts to do so are faulty

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/trancharpeirsoc.50.2.175

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Abstract

Despite the attention it has received in recent years, C. S. Peirce’s so-called neglected argument for God’s reality remains somewhat obscure. The aim of this essay is to clarify the basic structure of Peirce’s threepart argument and to show how it falls prey to several objections. I argue that his overall argument is ultimately unsuccessful in demonstrating the reality of God, even if it provides some degree of warrant for the belief in God’s reality to those who are uncontrollably drawn to that belief during the process of musement.

 

And it appears to me that musement itself is a problematic notion.

[mfbukowski]

Calm, what did you like about Clark's post?

[Calm]

27 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

Calm, what did you like about Clark's post?

I like his admitting he is being a stinker.

I like posts that give glimpses of personality...

Clark's posts almost always make me think, like yours.  He gets lots of points from me for that even the times I am not persuaded by them....but this one was pure gut reaction to his opening line.  Made me laugh.

Edited March 17, 2018 by Calm

[clarkgoble]

3 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

OK but as we have discussed before I see Peirce's philosophy as irrelevant to theology whereas Rorty is obviously directly relevant and supportive.

I know you are a Peirce fan but straight up, I don't see any support there for religion of any kind and in fact arguably his attempts to do so are faulty

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/trancharpeirsoc.50.2.175

And it appears to me that musement itself is a problematic notion.

Well his neglected argument (which is actually more broadly about abduction and not merely God) isn't all he dealt with religion on. But that seems beside the point since I was just talking about the whole "it's all sentences" part in preference to "it's all signs" which I think has big implications. Basically Peirce's dicisigns gives a way for propositions to be outside of the human brain which I think has interesting implications.

[mfbukowski]

2 hours ago, clarkgoble said:

Basically Peirce's dicisigns gives a way for propositions to be outside of the human brain which I think has interesting implications.

Propositions? Outside the human mind?

What then defines the word?

1. .

   a statement or assertion that expresses a judgment or opinion.

   "the proposition that all men are created equal"

   synonyms:

   theory, hypothesis, thesis, argument, premise, principle, theorem, concept, idea, statement "the analysis derives from one proposition"
2. 2.

   a suggested scheme or plan of action, especially in a business context.

   "a detailed investment proposition"

   synonyms:

   proposal, scheme, plan, project, idea, program, bid "a business proposition"

Edited March 17, 2018 by mfbukowski

[clarkgoble]

11 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Propositions? Outside the human mind?

What then defines the word?

1.  

The word proposition? I'd assume like all words its meaning evolves as we gain greater understanding. So as not to confuse with the existing connotations of the word Peirce used dicisign.

To turn the question around given so much of our communication is not in terms of words, why assume words are the basis of all this?

To draw analogy when a computer is doing something that seems tied to representations and truth, why say truth isn't involved and is only a feature of human sentences rather than signs? Effectively Peirce breaks propositions from necessary intentionality. An other way of putting it is that he breaks tying meaning to consciousness - which seems a fundamentally correct move. And he's hardly alone in that - you can argue it was a common view in antiquity. Tying consciousness with meaning/truth seems more something Descartes really introduced. Peirce is hardly alone with that break.

Edited March 18, 2018 by clarkgoble

[mfbukowski]

20 hours ago, clarkgoble said:

The word proposition? I'd assume like all words its meaning evolves as we gain greater understanding. So as not to confuse with the existing connotations of the word Peirce used dicisign.

To turn the question around given so much of our communication is not in terms of words, why assume words are the basis of all this?

To draw analogy when a computer is doing something that seems tied to representations and truth, why say truth isn't involved and is only a feature of human sentences rather than signs? Effectively Peirce breaks propositions from necessary intentionality. An other way of putting it is that he breaks tying meaning to consciousness - which seems a fundamentally correct move. And he's hardly alone in that - you can argue it was a common view in antiquity. Tying consciousness with meaning/truth seems more something Descartes really introduced. Peirce is hardly alone with that break.

I think there is a basic misunderstanding here.  It's not that there is no "truth" - it is just that using that word is contextual and undefinable.  If you want to call anything "true" I have no problem with it- I would just say we need to look at the context in which that term is used.

If you use it in a context about computer languages or how they function- great, just know it is WITHIN a context and nothing more.

I have no problem with "I know the church is true" in sacrament meeting or any LDS context.  I think the Golden Rule is probably an "objective moral truth " in the CONTEXT of church discussions because I think it is a statement of a practice which always works in social interaction.

This is about "language games"

If Peirce is talking about "propositions" or you are talking about propositions there ought to be a definition because this is a philosophical discussion.  EVERY serious philosopher must have their own definition or subscribe to other definitions- this is a large area in philosophy itself, defining what a "proposition" is- and so I asked you what it was for Peirce.

I mean just check out this article:  https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/propositions/

I took a class from David Lewis at UCLA and as the article notes, this is what he thinks about the word "proposition"

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One might wonder whether a single class of entities can play all these roles. If David Lewis (1986, p. 54) is right in saying that “the conception we associate with the word ‘proposition’ may be something of a jumble of conflicting desiderata,” then it will be impossible to capture our conception in a consistent definition.

Later in that article this is quoted:

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Propositions exist, for Schiffer, but unlike rocks or cats, there is nothing more to them than what our concept of a proposition guarantees. One may call them “abstract entities,” if one likes, but this label should not encourage the thought that our minds can reach beyond the physical world to make contact with denizens of a Platonic universe. We know about propositions, not by interacting with them, as we do with rocks and cats, but by being participants in certain sorts of linguistic or conceptual practice. It’s because we speak or think in certain ways that we are able to know about propositions.

 

You said that "propositions can exist outside the human mind" and I was simply questioning what that could possibly mean- I have no understanding of how that could happen.

In my opinion things don't "point" to other things "in the world".  You might have a perception of a thing which then is mentally associated with another by "causality" but for me and Hume the whole idea of causality for example is definitely not "in the world" but an arbitrary way of seeing things

I mean it is totally clear that Peirce himself is a human being using language to create his own logical context about one way of seeing the world and there are obviously other ways of seeing the world

To me that is blatantly obvious.  He puts forth is triadic logic and that is a creation of Peirce, and an entire philosophical system.   He was a brilliant man with a brilliant theory.  Wonderful !!  It is useful and functions well within certain contexts

But to actually SEE that as a "correct description of language" or even a "correct description about how the world works" to me obviously inadequate.  It might be useful, it might explain some logical problems but it is still a human point of view created by a human being using language.

I mean how is that NOT obvious??

So the question Rorty and Wittgenstein raise is a kind of meta-question about how a view such as Peirce's could in any way itself "correspond" to "reality", and how we could know that it did

I think that is what is missing here-

And the final answer for me as an apologist is how the heck does Peirce's view help Mormonism?   Honestly it is clear to me and many others that his "Reality of God" arguments are not really arguments and do not help the cause of theism.

I am just not seeing the usefulness of his view for religion, which is my prime interest as an apologist.

But here is the clincher for me

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 An other way of putting it is that he breaks tying meaning to consciousness - which seems a fundamentally correct move. And he's hardly alone in that - you can argue it was a common view in antiquity. Tying consciousness with meaning/truth seems more something Descartes really introduced. Peirce is hardly alone with that break.

 

 

 

We have discussed this before and you know what I think about Cartesianism- and why of course it is tied to the "ancient world" which means Aristotle and Plato and Neoplatonism etc- postulating from the beginning that there is a realm of ideas corresponding to the world outside

And that is precisely where religion fails.

That leads to Cardinal Bellarmine wanting the Bible to be science, it leads to substance theology and transubstantiation and precisely all the things the restoration should have been avoiding

It does not make me happy. 

That is about the most charitable thing I can say about the correspondence theory. 

 

Edited March 18, 2018 by mfbukowski

[mfbukowski]

On 3/16/2018 at 4:10 PM, clarkgoble said:

Just to be a stinker - that presupposes that truth is essentially tied to sentences. That's not necessarily the case. Peirce thought you could have something like truth and representation without human minds. The abstraction of propositions Peirce called dicisigns. A good book on the subject with examples from molecular biology is Natural Propositions by Frederik Stjernfelt.

Ultimately these questions end up hinging upon whether you think them in terms of generalized signs (semiotics) or merely stay at the sentence level (a small subset of semiotics). 

I just want to make another comment on this- for what it is worth, I looked at least at the review on Amazon- I know- that is a pretty sorry excuse for not reading the book- but at least I got that far  - and I noticed this paragraph

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Natural Propositions is about the desirable consequence of Charles Peirce's conception of propositions; namely, that they are no strangers to a naturalist world-view and thus form natural inhabitants of reality. This is because propositions---in Peirce's generalization: Dicisigns---do not depend upon human language nor upon human consciousness or intentionality, contrary to most standard assumptions. In addition to a careful consideration of Peirce's work, the book includes numerous examples of Dicisigns in nature as firefly signaling and vervet monkey alarm calls.

 

 

 

If that is all Peirce is saying, I have no problem with calling that "language" - obviously other creatures use "signs" to signal each other- dog packs use body language, animals are drawn to food by sound and smell etc- but that doesn't mean that "propositions are in the world"- but in all CONSCIOUSNESS and are a kind of "language" within a context!

I suppose if one wants to see the world that way, one can.  One could make all "causality" into intention, saying that the breakage, say, of a large boulder deep in the earth "signals" to the other rocks around it to break and cause an earthquake.  That is the mode of thinking here that Peirce is using but reversed.  The mode I am describing puts signals into causality itself and makes everything "conscious" while Peirce seems to be making nothing conscious and putting signs into everything.

But to me both those extremes are silly and unnecessary.And of course I think that Rorty gives us the best view-  

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Truth cannot be out there- cannot exist independently of the human mind- because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there.

 

I don't see how monkey alarm calls put "truth" into the world any more than this conversation is "in the world".  In a sense, yes, if the monkey makes an alarm call, there either really IS or IS not a threat and so in that community of monkeys that call is either "true" or "false".   It might be a "false alarm"!!

But do other animals using "language" place propositions into "the world" independent of conscious activity?  No way!

A chimp using a stick to take ants out of an ant hill is clearly an instance of an animal using a "tool"- it is evidence of consciousness, not at all like two rocks bumping into each other rolling down hill as a kind of "signal" to the other rock.

Thomas Nagel speaks about bats and how they interact with sound waves to find prey and how that type of consciousness is yet another way of life exploring their "reality" and whether or not that can be classified as "objective" understanding which is "in the world" as opposed to "in the mind of the bat"

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Very little work has been done on the basic question (from which mention of the brain can be entirely omitted) whether any sense can be made of experiences' having an objective character at all. Does it make sense, in other words, to ask what my experiences are really like, as opposed to how they appear to me? We cannot genuinely understand the hypothesis that their nature is captured in a physical description unless we understand the more fundamental idea that they have an objective nature (or that objective processes can have a subjective nature).14 I should like to close with a speculative proposal. It may be possible to approach the gap between subjective and objective from another direction.

Setting aside temporarily the relation between the mind and the brain, we can pursue a more objective understanding of the mental in its own right. At present we are completely unequipped to think about the subjective character of experience without relying on the imagination—without taking up the point of view of the experiential subject. This should be regarded as a challenge to form new concepts and devise a new method—an objective phenomenology not dependent on empathy or the imagination. Though presumably it would not capture everything, its goal would be to describe, at least in part, the subjective character of experiences in a form comprehensible to beings incapable of having those experiences.

We would have to develop such a phenomenology to describe the sonar experiences of bats; but it would also be possible to begin with humans. One might try, for example, to develop concepts that could be used to explain to a person blind from birth what it was like to see. One would reach a blank wall eventually, but it should be possible to devise a method of expressing in objective terms much more than we can at present, and with much greater precision. The loose intermodal analogies—for example, 'Red is like the sound of a trumpet'—which crop up in discussions of this subject are of little use. That should be clear to anyone who has both heard a trumpet and seen red. But structural features of perception might be more accessible to objective description, even though something would be left out. And concepts alternative to those we learn in the first person may enable us to arrive at a kind of understanding even of our own experience which is denied us by the very ease of description and lack of distance that subjective concepts afford

 Apart from its own interest, a phenomenology that is in this sense objective may permit questions about the physically basis of experience to assume a more intelligible form. Aspects of subjective experience that admitted this kind of objective description might be better candidates for objective explanations of a more familiar sort. But whether or not this guess is correct, it seems unlikely that any physical theory of mind can be contemplated until more thought has been given to the general problem of subjective and objective. Otherwise we cannot even pose the mind-body problem without sidestepping it.

 

https://organizations.utep.edu/portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf

I think it is clear that we do not now have such a science, but that if and when we do- we will be able to make a scientific analysis of God based on the human phenomenology of "what it is like to experience God"

If it can be important to philosophy to discuss what it is like to be a bat, it is far more important to discuss what it is like to experience God.

 

Edited March 19, 2018 by mfbukowski